we're having problems thinking of ideas for food to bring this year. Been the BM the last two years, first year my friend was the veteran and brought all the food. Very nice of him, but it consisted of cheese sticks and top ramen. With all that biking this girl needs more than that. So, last year I brought my husband and I made extra dinner portions to freeze. That consisted of things like Stir fry, pesto pasta shells, and left over Thai Food. The Thai Food was to die for...the rest was just gross. I have no idea why, maybe it was just because the environment, or using dry ice to freeze. We ended up living off of the bare min the rest of the week.

Our camp set up this year is with friends (same one i went with my first year), and the cooking situation is basic. two burner propane stove. which is fine, but he is insisting on not using a evap pool so when cleaning dishes/pans the dirty water has to go into a garbage bag. so, the less cooking and hard to clean up cooking the better. any freaking idea on what a person could bring besides top ramen and cup o noodles to the Playa? I've been told bread doesn't do well out there so never bothered...is that true?

what are the staples for you? any suggestions or things that work well for you?

thanks everyone! feel stupid for not doing a search. sorry bout that. what can i say...i'm special...

just read through all the suggestions. boil in a bag....duh! Here we were getting a pan all dirty for nothing. ensure shakes...great idea also. i remember having that 'everything sounds gross' feeling but knew that i needed to have something effect last year. i'll be packing those for sure.

We make several portions of hamburger helper and pasta with the meat sauce already stirred in, then poor in one gallon ziplocks and freeze hard as a rock. Another thing I did last year that worked really well was pre-cooked bacon. Take your bacon and put on a cookie sheet(at home), throw it in the oven at 350 for fifteen or twenty minutes. Take the bacon out and drain it then wrap in wax paper and freeze. This way when you need your fix it's only a few minutes til you're eating bacon, just put it in the pan for five or ten minutes and done. Cooking bacon on the playa from the start takes a while due to the elevation and wind and then you have a lot of grease to get rid of.

Jackass wrote:We make several portions of hamburger helper and pasta with the meat sauce already stirred in, then poor in one gallon ziplocks and freeze hard as a rock. Another thing I did last year that worked really well was pre-cooked bacon. Take your bacon and put on a cookie sheet(at home), throw it in the oven at 350 for fifteen or twenty minutes. Take the bacon out and drain it then wrap in wax paper and freeze. This way when you need your fix it's only a few minutes til you're eating bacon, just put it in the pan for five or ten minutes and done. Cooking bacon on the playa from the start takes a while due to the elevation and wind and then you have a lot of grease to get rid of.

Oooh I'm going to do that ! Thanks Jackass

Burning Man isn't about the stuff you see when you get there ....it's about the people that brought that stuff there

This is the first year I'm bringing "real" food, I'm so tired of backpacking meals! I froze veggie chili in a gallon zip lock, also going to make meatballs and gravy to freeze - thinking about doing those in an aluminum foil bread pan that would double as a bowl to eat it out of...same concept as boil-in-bag, I figure I can put the pan in the pot with a little water and "poach" it. It will be interesting to see which method - ziploc vs. foil pan - will work best.

Cooking everything in advance and reheating them on the playa are great ideas. Here are a few of my easy peasy ideas:

Breakfast: pre-cooked bacon, pancakes / waffles, breakfast sausages, pop tarts, hard-boiled eggs. The messiest part is maple syrup, but we tend to sop it up with the pancakes and waffles. So easy and very little to clean.

Dinner: Frozen pre-cooked, headless, tail-less jumbo shrimp - just thaw and eat with cocktail sauce (DIVINE), frozen cooked steaks, kabobs, salmon, etc. Just heated up with a tiny bit of oil on my small frying pan on top of my $20 Coleman one-burner propane tank. Another cheat: we order take-out from our favorite restaurants, freeze everything, and just thaw when we get onto the playa. Very little clean-up.

Bacon: I have tried cooking it on the stove until it is almost crisp, then, portioning it out into foil packets. They are good in the fridge for quite a while. Lay a foil packet over a propane flame and it's ready to eat when you hear the sizzle (about a minute).

Eat from the foil and save a plate.

"Burning Man ruined my life as I knew it, and I have never been happier." -mgb327

These are all great ideas! Trader Joe's has a lot of yummy, pre-packaged options, including their various indian food packets and pre-cooked, sealed rice. All you have to do is heat up the indian food packets in water and they end up heating the rice. One of my top choices anytime I go camping is peanut butter & nutella sandwiches. yum! A friend recommended pickles for something salty, too.

Those Indian foods are already cooked, so if you're lazy about cooking in the desert, you can also just roll 'em in a tortilla and be done with it. Just check the protein content when you buy (the higher the better) . . . potatoes at least, or chickpeas and veg. Or mix a rice and a sauce.

I'm planning to bring a dry ice cooler and freeze the meat I'm bringing, such as meatballs for either pasta or with a nice gravy over rice, chicken for my peasant soup, or quesadillys, hamburger patties, chili fixin's for the chili cook-off, shrimp, beef or chicken for kabobs etc.

I'm really into homemade soups...

Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.

Just a thought here, if you do the boil a bag all week long with the same pot of water, and not using an evap pond for the left over water, how about just boiling off the pot of water on the cold night before you leave?

Lovely ideas all of you, but why stop at every day, common food? Its Burning Man XD if i was cooking for an event like this, i would create something monumental, something that could be made daily, but would catch the eye of the unsuspecting viewers. Somthing like a 5 foot tall burning man poundcake, or a temple of food XD im crazy though so those ideas seem quite outlandish, but hey burn on :::D

HiBbY wrote:Lovely ideas all of you, but why stop at every day, common food? Its Burning Man XD if i was cooking for an event like this, i would create something monumental, something that could be made daily, but would catch the eye of the unsuspecting viewers. Somthing like a 5 foot tall burning man poundcake, or a temple of food XD im crazy though so those ideas seem quite outlandish, but hey burn on :::D

You're doing it right.

(Although maybe not your virgin year.)

The Lady with a Lamprey

"The powerful are exploiting people, art and ideas, and this leads to us plebes debating how to best ration ice.Man, no wonder they always win....." Lonesomebri